


How To Raise A Serial Killer

by stubbornbones



Category: Laid to Rest (2009)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-13
Updated: 2020-08-13
Packaged: 2021-03-05 21:54:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,593
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25872460
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stubbornbones/pseuds/stubbornbones
Summary: You, 87 years ago: (I seriously have an entire childhood planned out for Jesse based on nothing but that 2-second flashback in L2R2, but that’s a beast for a different post.) Us, checking watch: Is it time for this post yet??
Kudos: 4





	How To Raise A Serial Killer

**Author's Note:**

> I was gonna add this to Horror Galorror but I love it so much it gets its own post.
> 
> This is based on a 2-second flashback sequence in L2R2 and the rest is pulled entirely out of my ass.

Paul Cromeans was a mean son of a bitch. Anyone in town would attest to that. He was drunk more often than he was sober and liked to talk with his fists. Rumor had it he’d beaten his wife to death and hidden her body in the swamp. Other folks said that was stupid, that she’d just gotten tired of being a punching bag and high-tailed it out of there. Whatever the truth was, she’d vanished seemingly overnight, leaving Paul behind with their infant son. When little Jesse was old enough to ask about his mother, Paul - who would never accept the consequences of his actions - told the boy that she’d been a gold-digging whore who ran off with a richer man. **  
**

He blamed the specter of his wife for all the woes in his life. When the windows leaked during hurricane season, it was because she had never taken good care of the house. When it became clear that Jesse would never talk, it was because she smoked and drank while she was pregnant. When he turned his fists on his son, it was because she had left him a lonely and desolate man instead of supporting him the way a wife should.

***

Paul worked nights cleaning the county funeral home. The pay wasn’t much: it was enough for Paul’s drinks and his smokes and to keep the bank away from their doorstep, but not enough for childcare. When Jesse grew out of his infant cuteness and the neighborhood ladies would no longer watch him for free, Paul started bringing him to work with him. He’d sit the boy on a chair in the foyer with strict instructions not to move, and shake him awake hours later when it was time to go home.

Jesse listened, at first. The funeral home was scary in the dark, the proprietor looked old and mean, and there were probably _ghosts_. He’d huddle in whatever chair his father plunked him down in, refusing to even let his feet touch the floor. But as time passed, he got older, braver, and more bored, and started to explore the shadowy depths of the building. One night, venturing deeper than he’d dared before, he’d stumbled upon the proprietor working over one of the deceased. It was a young woman, grey-skinned and nude on the metal table. Jesse froze in the doorway.

It was the first dead human he’d seen, and the first naked woman. He was eight years old.

He must have made some sort of noise, because the proprietor looked up from his work and beckoned Jesse inside. The boy obeyed, more afraid of angering the old man than he was of the corpse.

“Go on, then,” the proprietor ordered in his smoker’s rasp. “Touch her.” Jesse didn’t move. The proprietor scoffed at the boy’s hesitation and grabbed his hand, forcing him to touch the dead woman’s foot. Jesse cringed, half-expecting the body to move, but it remained as cold and still as the dead animals he sometimes found on the side of the road.

“See?” the proprietor said. “Ain’t nothing to be afraid of. She’s just meat.”

Shortly after that, Paul started leaving Jesse home alone when he went to work. Jesse didn’t think it had anything to do with the body, but he was too scared to ask.

***

School was hard. Not because Jesse was stupid - he wasn’t - but because he was _smart_ and no one else knew it. His classmates pushed him around and called him names because his clothes were shabby and his daddy had punched Mark’s daddy at the bar last weekend and he physically _couldn’t_ tell them to stop. Teachers ignored him because he couldn’t talk. When he did well on tests, they accused him of cheating, so he stopped trying. He still listened to their lessons, because they were interesting, but he sat in the back of the classroom and doodled skulls and broken stick figures in the margins of his worksheets.

His only friend was the old, kindly school librarian who let him eat lunch among the shelves. She had managed to dig up a book about sign language, and sat with him patiently as he signed the alphabet over and over with clumsy fingers. But she died of a heart attack when Jesse was ten, and her replacement wasn’t anywhere as sympathetic, and he was forced to return to the cruel company of his peers. He stole the sign language book from the library out of spite and practiced signing in the dirty mirror at home.

***

Jesse’s relationship with his father was rocky. Paul was often too drunk to read the notes Jesse wrote, and he refused to waste his time learning how to wave his hands around like a “fuckin’ fairy.” This communicative gap made even the most basic interactions more difficult than they should have been.

Their only common ground was hunting, where Jesse proved to be a natural. When Paul was in a rare good mood, he’d brag to the other men at the bar about how his boy could sneak close enough to a deer to slap it on the rump if he had half a mind to. And if Jesse seemed to prefer gutting the carcasses over shooting, well. Every man should know how to butcher his own kill.

***

Jesse had his first major growth spurt when he was fourteen, and entered high school a lanky, gangling giant of a boy. The physical bullying stopped, his sheer size enough to deter most people, but the name-calling grew worse, more targeted. The teachers saw his size and his silence and assumed he was some kind of idiot. He started walking with a hunch, wishing he could shrink down and disappear into the crowd.

High school was also where Jesse first noticed Lindsey Forrester. She had hair like corn silk, a smile like a movie star’s, and the bluest eyes you ever did see. Compared to the dead woman from the funeral home and the crinkled pictures in Paul’s Playboys, Lindsey was like a ray of sunshine. Jesse was pretty sure that even if he could talk, he’d never be able to form a sentence around her. Even though he was pushing 6’4”, she made him feel three inches tall. She didn’t make fun of him, but she didn’t talk to him, either. She was the only one whose attention he would have welcomed, and she didn’t even notice him.

So it was something of a shock when she asked him out in 11th grade. He said yes, naturally, and was even able to make her laugh through the awkwardness after she asked for his phone number out of habit. (It was the only time his muteness ever came in handy; he would’ve been mortified to admit his house didn’t have a phone.) He skipped class on Friday to scrub his father’s dirty old car to spotlessness, and stole Paul’s only nice shirt from the closet after he passed out drunk.

Jesse waited outside the diner for three hours before he accepted that Lindsey wasn’t going to show up. Come Monday, everyone was sneaking glances at him and snickering behind their hands. On Tuesday, Lindsey announced that she and Mark were dating.

He started to understand why his father spoke so harshly about his mother.

***

Paul’s liver gave up the ghost the summer after Jesse graduated high school, dragging the rest of Paul along with it. The coroner didn’t even bother with an autopsy; everyone knew Paul Cromeans would drink himself to death one day. No one expected Jesse to mourn, and he didn’t. He chose the cheapest burial option, turned the ramshackle house over to the bank, and left town with nothing but his hunting knife and his father’s beat up car.

It was fortunate they hadn’t run a toxicology panel on Paul.

***

Jesse returned to town only once, the year he turned 21.

No one knew where he’d gotten the money from. Rumor had it he was running drugs for the cartel in Miami. Other folks said that was stupid, that he’d just gotten lucky or maybe found a job with one of the new tech companies that were popping up everywhere. Whatever the method, Jesse Cromeans rolled into town with a new car, new tattoos, and a pair of designer sunglasses, and bought his childhood home back from the bank. Cash.

He’d filled out, too, his muscles drawing admiring looks from the girls who wouldn’t give him the time of day at school. Including Lindsey Forrester.

“I never got to tell you how sorry I was about your dad,” she murmured as she straddled him in the backseat. “You left town so fast, I didn’t even get to say goodbye.” She and Mark were set to be married the following spring. Her engagement ring was currently somewhere under Jesse’s passenger seat.

“I was such an idiot for standing you up in high school,” she sighed as they shared a cigarette afterwards. “It was a bet, but I totally would’ve shown up if I’d known this was how things would turn out.”

“ _How much did you win?_ ” Jesse asked.

“Nothing,” she said. “It was just a stupid dare between stupid kids.”

“ _Now that’s a damn shame._ ”

“Why?” Lindsey giggled, trying and failing to blow a smoke ring.

“ _Because that means you died for nothing_.”

***

The last thing Jesse did was burn his old house to the ground. He didn’t add Lindsey to the growing collection in his glove box. She wasn’t worth the tape.


End file.
